Totally agree! China and italy have handled this much better than we are. No way for us to know how bad this is since we are not testing and don’t seem to be capable of testing efficiently.
Hopefully our next president will re-incorporate some measures to help safeguard against such things as this instead of dismantling them like the current regime.
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Originally Posted by seanofjapan
I think I agree with this.
The markets around the world have tanked this week and the reason is that they expect the situation in the US to become way worse than it has in China, which is quite scary actually.
The reason is basically they don't see any effective response being formulated by the US government right now and its too late at this point to do much about that.
In China the response was kind of bungled from the start in a similar way - the leadership just tried to ignore and deny it for a while. But then they changed literally overnight from doing nothing to suddenly taking aggressive measures to contain it. And those seem to have worked, it looks like China will peak with fewer than 100,000 cases and about 4,000 deaths, which while tragic is way better than it could have been.
What has markets freaking out is that the outbreak in the US is already way past the point it was in China when it made that pivot. They only had a few hundred cases at that point and it was contained to a single region when the Central government started taking it seriously and imposing strict measures. In the US now it has already spread to almost all 50 states, and there are thousands of cases, maybe 10s of thousands given what little we know thanks to a lack of testing, and its spreading at an exponential rate.
And despite this, there still isn't really any plan for getting it under control being articulated by the Federal government. The opportunity to limit the damage to what China incurred has already been squandered and the markets recognize this. They seem to be pricing in an epidemic with numbers in the millions in the US and commensurate economic fallout.
I would not be buying stocks right now, nobody knows where the floor for this is.
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